PHILADELPHIA—Customs agents seized more than two dozen giant beetles—some the size of a child's hand—from an overseas package after postal workers heard the insects making scratching noises. The large bugs arrived last week from Taiwan at a post office in Mohnton, about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia, in a box whose contents were labeled as toys, gifts and jellies, off...

Dung beetles, although not one of the favorite insects of many people, may perform essential services to the environment in many ecosystems. Their gathering, transportation, and burying of the dung of various omnivores and herbivores helps to remove accumulations of manure, fertilize the surrounding areas, aerate the ground, and to disperse various seed types...

Adult beetles are drawn to manure by the odor, and some species will fly up to ten miles in search of the right patch of dung. Adult dung beetles use only the liquid contents of the manure for their nutrients; they do not actually “eat” the dung...

Dung beetles are much more complicated than they appear at first glance. The ancient Egyptians thought that dung beetles were all males, and created progeny spontaneously by injecting semen into balls of dung. Although this is not true, it is an example of how much more complex life is than what we assume...

DALLAS—In what sounds like a really low-budget horror film, voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers...

Colombian cashes in on beetle-mania abroad. An entrepreneur ships giant, exotic types of the insects by the hundreds each month to Japan and elsewhere. His enterprise is part of his country's belated effort to commercially exploit its stunning variety of plant and animal species. By Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2008: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... 9607.story

Caption for picture:

German Viasus of Tunja, Colombia, shows off some of his Hercules beetles, which he exports to Asia for pets. Male Hercules beetles can grow to 7 inches and weigh as much as a hamster. “The beetles have a personality and know those of us who take care of them,” the industrial engineer says.

From the article:

...Viasus seems to feel as much affection for the insects as do his Asian clients, possibly because his business, which is approved by both Colombian and Japanese governments, is so lucrative. He ships 300 giant beetles a month that retail for as much as $350 each in Tokyo pet stores...

The Hercules beetle can lift or move 400 times its body weight, said German Amat-Garcia, an entomologist at Bogota's National University of Colombia. That strength derives from the insect's "biomechanical design" and is on display when male beetles "wrestle" with one another during mating season, he said.

For the Japanese, big beetles are not just pets, but good-luck charms and symbols of strength and tenacity. Beetles are lovable protagonists of video games and comic books, and beetle-based cartoon characters adorn lunchboxes and children's pajamas much like Mickey Mouse does in the United States...

..."The bark-beetle problem is an immense and complex and difficult problem," said Sen. Ken Salazar, a Denver Democrat. "It's difficult to be able to get the legislation through."...

The mountain pine beetle had killed about 980,000 acres in Colorado by 2007, compared with 664,000 acres in 2006 when the delegation united behind a bill, according to the Colorado State Forest Service...

Congressional efforts to deal with bark beetles date back almost a decade. Although there have been successes, the beetles have gained the advantage over lawmakers stalled by bureaucracy and partisanship.

It took until 2006 for the delegation to merge pieces of legislation from different members, but decisions they made early on may have doomed it.

The delegation wide bill proposes a series of fixes: grants to communities to implement fire protection plans; collection points for culled trees; creation of a special healthy-forest fund; and tax incentives for companies that cut and haul trees and for electricity produced from forest products...

DENVER (AP) ― A few campgrounds on national forest land in Colorado will open later than usual so trees can be sprayed to ward off bark beetles...

The U.S. Forest Service announced earlier that 21 campgrounds and two recreational sites in northern Colorado and southeastern Wyoming will stay closed for the summer because of hazards from trees killed by bark beetles. The trees can fall as the roots start to rot.

Trees in some of the campgrounds in the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests will be sprayed to keep away the beetles...

Bark beetles have killed huge swaths of pine trees in Colorado, Wyoming and South Dakota. The bugs that burrow under the bark have killed about 1.5 million acres of trees in Colorado.

Streams with a Pulse At only a few places in the world can one experience "surge flow", a stream flowing in rhythmic waves. Three elements are needed to produce the phenomenon: a steep enough grade to give the stream a higher velocity; a smooth, mobile surface with little resistance; and sufficient water to create surges. In spring and early summer, these elements combine to make waves at Great Sand Dunes. As water flows across sand, sand dams or 'antidunes' form, gathering water. When the water pressure is too great, the dams break, sending down a wave. In wet years, waves can surge up to a foot high!

Look back to my May 17th post on this thread to learn about dung beetles. At a new Insect Museum in New Orleans, "...Outside bathrooms, dung beetles roll balls of waste in an exhibit framed by a yard-high imitation of such a ball..." http://www.kansascity.com/270/story/689797.html

At the May Natural History Museum of the Tropics, located southwest of Colorado Springs. "...near Fort Carson and today a replica of the Hercules Beetle of the West lndies marks the turnoff to the Museum" and, among the displays, "There are Colombian Beetles so large that they can break street lights and knock a man down if they hit him while flying." http://www.maymuseum-camp-rvpark.com/na ... istory.htm

The 4th of July weekend wouldn't be complete without mention of and thanks to our men and women serving in the armed forces. Cartoonist Mort Walker made a comic strip about a regular troop called "Beetle Bailey". Mort Walker was one of the University of Missouri's famous alums, and there is a Beetle Bailey statue in the Mizzou botanic gardens: http://web.missouri.edu/~umccfbotanical ... Garden.php

My son loves the Swetsville zoo. My parents took him there last year when he stayed with them. The man who did those sculptures is pretty crafty with "junk". I am glad it is still going, I had fun there when I was a kid.

...First, Volkswagen of America has confirmed it will import a version of the sixth-generation Golf. We'll have two models. The "base" Golf becomes the Golf GT, indicating VW plans to go upmarket again and get out of the $15,000 entry-car business here, at least for models imported from Europe. VW also will import the MkVI GTI, with both versions headed here about 2010...

Then comes the North American version of the Up!, which made its debut at the 2007 Frankfurt show. VW is rumored to be considering a Beetle-style version of the rear-engine, monobox/hatchback concept. Makes sense, since American consumers remain more nostalgic for the Beetle than they are practical about boxy hatchbacks. What's more, J Mays designed his Concept 1, for the 1994 Detroit show, to be built on the smaller Polo platform, not the Golf platform, so we know that adaptation of the New Beetle style to a smaller car is far from impossible...

Heck, just click on the link above and look at the pics for the coming new ride...

A giant beetle thought to have been extinct in the UK since the early 18th Century has been rediscovered alive and well on a pavement.

The capricorn beetle, measuring 3.5cm long...

The Gloucestershire find, thought to be a male, has antennae reaching just over 6cm...

"The species makes an eerie screeching noise by rubbing its legs together to warn off predators and can give a nasty nip...

The capricorn is one of Europe's largest kinds of beetle and comes from the Cerambycidae (long horn) family of beetles. Capricorns are still found in France and parts of Western Europe, but are classed as extremely rare...

Oh yeah, you are going to have to click on the link and take a peek. Pretty big antennae compared to the body!

Novel drugs to fight cancer and tropical diseases could be found by looking for brightly coloured beetles and insects...

The find is reported by Ms Julie Helson and Todd Capson of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama City, in the Ecological Society of America’s journal, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

The plants chosen for this experiment were chosen based on previous screening for activity against breast, lung and central nervous system cancer cell lines and the tropical parasites responsible for malaria, leishmaniasis and Chagas’ disease, conducted by the Panama International Cooperative Biodiversity Group Program.

A search for beetles and caterpillars on plants with and without activity revealed that insects with bright warning coloration were significantly more common on plants that contained compounds with activity against these diseases...

"We knew that brightly coloured insects advertise to their predators that they taste bad and that some of them get their toxins from their host plants, but because other insects cheat by mimicking the toxic ones, we weren’t sure if insect colour was really going to work to identify plants containing toxins. It did."...

"Although the idea that brightly-coloured insects could facilitate the search for medicinally active plants has been discussed for decades, the concept had never been rigorously tested. Our new work suggests that a quick screen for insects with warning coloration on tropical plants may increase the efficiency of the search for compounds active against cancer and tropical parasitic disease by four-fold, another example of how ecology can contribute to the discovery of novel medicines. It’s very gratifying to see that it works in the field." said Todd Capson, who directed the Panama-based project...

There's "limited edition," "special collector's edition," and "could auction it at Sotheby's edition." The definition gets blurry as Bloomingdale's announces it is coming out with a Beatles iPod loaded with every song from the Fab Four's catalog.

Here's the thing: they're only making 100 of them.

The Beatles iPod will be part of a series of Fab Four merchandise this holiday season from Bloomingdales, which has acquired the rights to the group's images from Apple Records.In edition to the iPods, there will be T-shirts, jackets and accessories that bear images from posters and album artwork...

LOS ANGELES (AP)—Sir George Martin, the classically trained producer who helmed the Beatles recordings from their mop-top phase through their late musical masterworks, was honored Saturday night in Los Angeles.

Martin, 82, received a career award from The Recording Academy's Grammy Foundation, which provides education programs for future music professionals and works to preserve musical history.

Martin is the most successful record producer of all time, according to the academy, with more than 50 chart-topping hits and one-billion units sold. He also holds the record for the longest run of No. 1 pop-chart hits in history, spanning 36 years...

"Yoko and Olivia are here tonight," Martin noted. "Paul and Ringo can't be here, because they're doing their own tour. They're workaholics. I can't understand why, but they are. I've been so lucky to work with so many wonderful people, and great talent all my life. ... I miss a lot of people. I miss so many people who have died on me. God knows I'm old enough. But younger people have left the scene, and I miss them, as you do, great people. John and George particularly."

The event also included a concert saluting Martin and the songs he helped make famous, with guest performers including songwriter Burt Bacharach, guitarist Jeff Beck and singer Tom Jones.

LONDON—The experts at London's Natural History Museum pride themselves on being able to identify species from around the globe, from birds and mammals to insects and snakes. Yet they can't figure out a tiny red-and-black bug that has appeared in the museum's own gardens.

The almond-shaped insect, about the size of a grain of rice, and was first seen in March 2007 on some of the plane trees that grow on the grounds of the 19th century museum, collections manager Max Barclay said Tuesday.

Within three months, it had become the most common insect in the garden, and it was also spotted in other central London parks, he said...

The body looks somewhat like a common squash bug to me, but the antennae are different. The squash bug has elbowed (geniculate) antennae and this bug has bristle-like (setaceous) antennae.

Many have heard of our huge pine-beetle problem. But, on the other hand, we are importing another beetle to defoliate an invasive species, the tamarisk. One of the places we get these helpful beetles from is, of all places, Kazakhstan. (Something Borat failed to tell us.)

GRAND JUNCTION — By the middle of next year, people may notice lots of dead trees along Grand Valley waterways, but that’s because a noxious plant is being killed off, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management says.

Fast-growing tamarisk trees have choked out many native species, said Missy Sider of the Montrose BLM office, but the introduction of a tamarisk-eating beetle in 2007 is making headway...

Places where tamarisk eradication is evident can be seen along the Dolores River near Gateway or along the Colorado River in Utah, Bean said.

...Bean and Dudley are searching for Diorhabda elongata, familiarly known as the tamarisk leaf beetle, newly arrived here from Kazakhstan by way of Utah, and, as it happens, stenciled in larger-than-life size on Dudley’s T-shirt. First released in the United States in 2001, the beetles were set free in Utah, about 20 miles from this spot, in 2005, and recently began to march along the muddy waters of the Dolores River. Their target, as their name indicates, is the riverside shrub known as tamarisk or saltcedar, one of the most infamous invasive weeds in the West.

Six weeks ago, Bean says, there were no beetles in this particularly thick stand of tamarisk, cottonwood, and willow, but now, the tamarisk - which towers, treelike, over the scientists’ heads - displays light brown tips, one of the first signs of beetle attack.

"The natives are already here," Dudley observes, looking at the native cottonwoods, some tall enough to form a canopy over the weeds. "They just need to be freed up." "And the beetles are going to free them," says Bean...

Tamarisk is one of the lessons in American West 101: About the time newcomers learn that the striking black-and-white bird on their porch is a common magpie, they find out that the feathery green riverside shrub with the pretty pink sprays of flowers is actually a nasty weed.

When and exactly how it arrived here is a matter of some debate, but the usual story is that tamarisk, a Eurasian species, was first planted in the West in the mid-1800s, both as an ornament and for erosion control on railroad beds and elsewhere. By the late 1800s, it had naturalized, and by the 1960s, it dominated vegetation along the Colorado, Rio Grande and Pecos rivers. Today, its Western range stretches from northern Mexico to Montana, and from Kansas to California, and covers over 1 million acres.

The conventional wisdom is that tamarisk, with its deep, tenacious root system, s-u-c-k-s up much more water than its native neighbors. Reality, as usual, is more complex: Recent analyses by researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz show that in the drier areas atop riverbanks, tamarisk does use far more water than native plants. In wetter areas near streams, stands of cottonwoods and willows often use nearly as much water as their exotic competitor.

Yet there’s no shortage of reasons to dislike tamarisk. Even though it offers some substitute food and shelter to native wildlife - a point we’ll tackle later - research shows that in general, animals living in tamarisk are less diverse, fewer in number, and less healthy than their counterparts in native vegetation. The plant’s trademark dense growth is thought to increase fire risk along riverbanks, and it resprouts quickly after burns. And as any boater can attest, the weed narrows streams and rivers, and chokes out campsites...

Despite their impressive arrival in North America, the beetles work slowly. Tamarisk and Diorhabda, after all, are longtime adversaries in their native lands, and tamarisk plants bounce back from beetle attacks again ... and again ... and again. Diorhabda larvae, which do most of the tamarisk chewing, can defoliate a 15-foot-high tamarisk in four days, but it takes five or six attacks over multiple years to kill a plant...

The beetles - which are, to an outside observer, not cute, but not as ugly as you might expect - are part of a veritable United Nations of beetles at the insectary. Populations from Crete, Kazakhstan, mainland Greece, Uzbekistan, and several areas of China are kept supplied with green tamarisk, all too easy to find here in the summer. In the winter, insectary workers turn to a few dozen scraggly-looking, nutrient-starved plants in their greenhouse. ("As soon as you try to grow a weed, you have all kinds of problems," says Bean.) When this emergency supply runs out, collaborators send buckets of green tamarisk from warmer climes and other greenhouses.

For more than a half-century, the insectary has supplied "beneficial" insects to local orchardists, and now, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it’s added the tamarisk beetle to its list of charges. Insectary workers have raised up and shipped out some 400,000 beetles from northwestern China to nine states, including various sites within Colorado. "We have a really big FedEx bill here," says Bean...

South Dakota State University entomologist Mike Catangui and USDA research entomologist Louis Hesler are calling South Dakota elementary children to become junior biologists as they search for rare ladybugs.

Catangui and Hesler are leading researchers in the Lost Ladybug Project.

The Project began at Cornell University in New York and is spreading across the nation as more and more researchers and children are on the lookout for the rare beetles.

Lady beetles, commonly called ladybugs or ladybirds, are especially important to agricultural states such as South Dakota...

Since the 1970s, however, lady beetles native to the United States and South Dakota have been disappearing quickly...

The Lost Ladybug Project has two components, according to Catangui and Hesler.

The first part involves entomologists and graduate students nationwide investigating conservation, biodiversity and invasive insect species, such as the Asian beetle.

The second part encourages elementary-age children to participate in "citizen science."

"Ladybugs appear to be universally appealing to 5- to 11-year old children anywhere in the world," Catangui said.

"As research subjects, ladybugs can be harmlessly handled and observed even by children."

Researchers encourage all children to help the effort...

Ultimately, the project hopes to involve about 10,000 children nationwide, building the largest, most accurate biological database ever developed by a citizen-science project...

...Besides...they're not really "bugs"...scientists say they're really beetles, for those who can tell the difference. Why do lightning bugs LIGHT, or flash? It's all about attracting a mate...showing their true colors, putting their best "light" forward...and all that. It's usually the male lightning bug we see floating around "strutting (flashing) his stuff"...while the female rests demurely on a leaf somewhere. If he catches her eye and peaks her interest, she'll return the "flash"...and there's s brief interchange of flashes as the male flies closer and closer. When he finally gets to her, IF he passes the female's acceptance (or flash) test...then they mate.

There are numerous species of lightning bugs...and each has it's own flash pattern, which prevents a "flasher" from attracting a potential mate from a wrong species. Lightning bugs normally live for several months, feeding on plant nectar...by the first of September they're usually gone. This is probably more than you want to know about these nocturnal Summer creatures...but it answers a lot of questions for those of us who've been wondering about them...since our days of with tiny flashing lights in the Mason jars.

...The practically heatless light of these insects is due to a most efficient chemical reaction in which a cell product called luciferin is burned in the presence of an enzyme, luciferase...

The flashing of fireflies is rhythmic; flashes are single or double, according to species, and are more frequent at higher temperatures. Rarely, outside the tropics, the flashes of thousands of individuals have been observed to synchronize...

Snails are the chief food of many species and, as would be expected, firefly larvae are found most abundantly in the damp situations suitable for their prey. Earthworms and cutworms also figure in their diet. "Glowworms", as these insects (firefly larvae) are often called (along with adult females of larval shape), inject a paralyzing fluid into their prey which may greatly exceed them in size. The larva requires 1 or 2 years to complete development, passing the winter in a cell in the soil...

Apropos of nothing, it seems, at the bottom of the article, it mentions that Disney produced an animated version of Alice In Wonderland in 1951. OK, if we are going to bring up animated versions for some reason, my favorite animated version of Alice in Wonderland remains the 1966 Hanna Barbera Rexall Color TV cartoon musical "Alice in Wonderland", where Alice falls into the TV and Sammy Davis, Jr. as the voice of the Cheshire Cat sings "What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This?" to Janet Waldo as Alice.

Where are the Queen of Hearts (voiced by Zsa Zsa Gabor), The White Knight (voiced by Bill Dana), The White Rabbit (voiced by Howard Morris), Hedda Hatter, the female counterpart of the Mad Hatter (gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, voiced by Harvey Korman), and Barney Rubble & Fred Flintstone as the two-headed talking Caterpillar (voiced by Mel Blanc and Alan Reed) when you really need them?

OK is mentioning animation a hint? Wouldn't it be great if they combined animation with the characters as Disney did in Mary Poppins (1964) or Hanna Barbera did in Jack in the Beanstalk with Gene Kelly, Bobby Riha, Ted Cassidy, and Marian McKnight (1967)?

In Hanna Barbera's Jack in the Beanstalk, there's a song "What does a Waffle Bird Do?" I guess, my conjectures are going to be wishful thinking -- "A waffle bird waffs!" OK, just keep a stiff upper lip and watch Bobby Riha lead an army of animated mice who look like Jerry (of animated Tom and Jerry fame) clones for now... (http://www.amazon.com/Jack-Beanstalk-Ge ... B00069EMOU). Of course, there's also the song in this animation which begins: "A tiny bit of faith and a large amount of hope or vicea versa..."